T H I S+W E E K Favorite travel books By Don George, Editor Two Towns in Provence by M.F.K. Fisher >Natural Opium by Diane Johnson The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen Roughing It by Mark Twain _ _ _ _ _ Hong Kong Farewell By Simon Winchester D E P A R T M E N T S Postmark | Brighton: Absurd in England By Andrew Ross The Surreal Gourmet Bananas for Bastille Day By Bob Blumer Readers' Tips and Tales Why does the world love to hate U.S. tourists? < - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LA S T+W E E K Tuesday, July 1 American Byways Summer festivals, great road books and other glories A full list of all Wanderlust articles

n a t u r a l_o p i u m BY DIANE JOHNSON KNOPF 234 PAGES _ _ _ _ _ _ BY DWIGHT GARNER not all great travel books relate grand, life-threatening adventures. Take Diane Johnson's tart and expertly crafted collection of essays titled "Natural Opium" (1993), perhaps the smartest travel book written in the last decade. Part of what makes Johnson such great company is that she's a reluctant traveler. She admits right up front that "I am not fond of travel in the best of circumstances," considering it to be a series of "inconvenient displacements punctuated by painful longings to be home." (This is in contrast to her husband, who finds travel a "natural opium.") Most of the trips she writes about here -- there are pieces set in Teheran, Bangkok, St. Petersburg, Taipei -- were undertaken with her husband, an internationally renowned disease specialist who is often called to far-flung locales. Johnson, along for the ride, teases rich social meaning out of minor subjects. In an essay titled "Wine," for instance, she turns a small embarrassment -- at a banquet in Thailand, an American doctor foolishly asks for a bottle of wine, which is very expensive and difficult to find there, and thus humiliates their hosts -- into a series of funny and profound meditations on drink and its discontents. And in "Rolex," Johnson discovers that a cheap fake watch she'd left (and forgotten about) in a Beijing hotel was mistaken for the genuine article, and the saga of its delivery back to her changed the lives of several of the Chinese men and women involved. It's a small story, but Johnson is alert to the emotional reverberations it casts. The best pieces in "Natural Opium" have the added friction of Johnson's comparing herself, inevitably unfavorably, with her calm and perhaps too-pleasant husband. In "The Great Barrier Reef," the couple embarks on a cramped five-day boat journey out to view the natural wonder. Johnson takes an immediate dislike to the tourists on the trip -- "fat Australians" and "barfing senior citizens" -- and she wickedly goes to the trouble of learning their names merely "in order to detest them with more precision." Observing these people during an island souvenir stop, she delivers an acid take on our impulse to acquire: "I brooded on the subject of souvenirs -- why they should exist, why people should want them, by what law they were made to be ugly -- shells shaped like toilets, a row of swizzle sticks in the shapes of women's silhouetted bodies, thin, fatter, fat, with bellies and breasts increasingly sagging as they graduated from SWEET SIXTEEN to SIXTY. I was unsettled to notice that the one depicting a woman of my age had a noticeably thickened middle. These trinkets were everywhere. I watched a man buy one, a fat one, and hand it to his wife. 'Here, Mother, this one's you,' he said. Laughter a form of hate. It was not a man from our ship, luckily, or I would have pushed him overboard." Immediately afterward, typically, Johnson scolds herself for her own "complicity in the industry of souvenirs," and for her self-serving justification that her impulse to shop was different because of class discriminations -- her own purchases were "tasteful baskets and elegant textiles." As the journey begins to come to a close and Johnson finally begins to enjoy herself, she still wonders, "Why was I not, like a nice person, simply content to be, to enjoy beauty and inner peace? Instead I must suffer, review, quiver with fear and rages -- the fault, I saw, was in myself, I was a restless, peevish, flawed person." Johnson's sufferings feel like our own; anyone who has traveled even moderately will know how expertly she picks at these small but painful emotional scabs. Johnson is also a talented fiction writer, and many of the essays here benefit from her novelistic gifts -- no more so than a piece titled "The Cuckoo Clock," in which, following a formal dinner high in the Swiss mountains, each of the astonished guests finds that a kind of prank has been played on them by their hosts: They will have to ride home through miles of dark, dangerous forest on toboggans. Thus we find "fifty or so sedentary, tipsy, maladroit, and terrified passengers -- dignified international doctors transformed unwillingly into feckless adventurers defying death with their portly bodies and bejeweled wives." Johnson turns the evening into an intensely wonderful and frightening comedy of manners; when predictable disaster befalls her on the mountain, she intones ruefully that the evening "seemed to me the longest and most disagreeable experience of my life." Yet in the end, she observes: "I have survived, therefore I will survive. Perhaps this was the whole point of travel." Johnson did more than survive, of course: She returned home to tell us these odd and deeply engaging tales. July 8, 1997 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Do you have a favorite travel book that you want to recommend? Discuss the best of travel reads in the Wanderlust section of Table Talk.

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